In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.
It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.
The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?
The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.” The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a political body of its own, capable of being wounded. The lives of individuals, whether caught up as soldiers in war, or as workers in a ruptured economy, or as victims of terrorist attacks, find themselves and their individual points of view eclipsed by that of the state itself. And this is true regardless of how central to the state’s very progress these individuals are.
The speech by President Obama last Wednesday night made me reflect specifically on Lincoln’s magnificent “Remarks” at the ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In his brilliant analysis of The Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills writes of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptation of the Greek Epitaphios or Funeral Oration to the task of dedicating a military cemetery on the site of the former American Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. Of this classical template, Wills writes that it provided a “prose form of the Greek orations that was meant to be bracing after the sung lament (threnos) of the burial rite…The prose form is itself a return to political life, a transition from family mourning to the larger community’s sense of purpose.” Lincoln built his speech up from a series of oppositions – life and death, word and deed, nature and society – and managed to extol the individual soldiers and their deeds without naming or describing them. And he ends with the transcendent frame of “the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.”
From sung lamentation to prosodic oratory, the State claims its transcendent purview. The State thus has its genres and can, at moments like that at Gettysburg, deploy them effectively. But we need to assess other historical moments of crisis, like that of the last weeks after the shootings in Tucson, in which the line between the purview and prerogatives of the state and those of individuals and families is not so clear cut, when the “right” genre for representing historical events does not so easily present itself, and when the confusion is largely a function of discord over the meaning of an event in real time.
The task then becomes doubly difficult – to fashion a language of interpretation that moves to that collective level of history but that also takes seriously the work of threnos (lamentation). Greek tragedy, another genre, found that middle way, largely because the families whose actions were performed were literally the families heading the state. And tragedies like Antigone were especially tuned to this combining, focusing on the conflicting demands of family and state. But the language of “family” can be expansive or restrictive as given society chooses to interpret it. Bifurcating the prerogatives of the private sphere and those of the public sphere can ultimately entail a loss of sympathy and collegiality in the most expansive meaning of the terms, that is in terms Hannah Arendt would put forward. Rather, it is possible to highlight the trajectory from threnos (lamentations of the family) to epitaphios (funerary oration) that carries forward the apprehension of the singularity of the one who is missing or mourned even in a genre that expresses the needs of the collectivity. I believe that this was Obama’s aim, and why he spent considerable time reflecting on the details of the lives of the individuals killed in Tucson. For many listeners, Obama’s speech hit the mark, moving them emotionally and drawing them together collectively. With the Gettysburg Address in the back of my mind, I found myself wanting more.
Leave a Reply